Just Fade Away
by CharlesTheBold
Summary: Trubutes are supposed to die in the arena. They are not supposed to disappear without a trace. But in the 60th Hunger Games, they do just that, and the Gamesmasters are scratching their heads. Please review
1. BLACKOUT

**They Just Fade Away**

 _(Disclaimer: I have no business connection with HUNGER GAMES. My only purpose in writing this story is to have fun and maybe share it)_

 **Chapter 1 BLACKOUT**

Chief Gamesmaker Paula Femus settled into her control chair with satisfaction. The Sixtieth Hunger Games had been going for a day, without a hitch. Five tributes dead at the Bloodbath, two killed later that day. Enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty of viewers, but still leaving seventeen to hold the audience's interest. The naysayers who had complained about her innovation had had to shut up.

Her innovation had been to design the smallest arena in Hunger Games history, not counting the earliest days when they used stadiums in the Capitol. Barely half a square kilometer, giving targets little space to get away from their predators. But the targets had been given another advantage. The arena had been covered with small hills that blocked sight lines. The hills, in turn, were riddled with caves, too numerous and standardized to be natural. Each cave was set up with a camera, in case a tribute hid there, but the Careers and other predators had no access to that view. They would have to search each cave to determine if their quarry was hiding there, creating tension and suspense. Paula was quite proud of her design. She just wished that people would stop calling it the Rabbit Warren Arena.

Then the monitors all went black.

"What happened?" demanded Paula.

"I don't know, milady," said the communications officer. "We lost all of our feed from the arena."

"Can you get ANYTHING? Signals from the trackers?"

"Nothing."

"What are the Hunger Games viewers seeing?" she asked the TV expert.

"A canned message that we have some technical difficulties. That's automatic."

That wouldn't stall the viewers for long; people in the Capitol were used to instant gratification.

"Get back the signal!"

"We're trying, milady. There's a special cable running from the Capitol to the arena carrying all the communications. It's blocked somehow."

"Get it unblocked! We need to get this taken care of before we get a call from -"

"President Snow on the line, milady," said her secretary.

Paula groaned. "I'll take it in my office." She did NOT want her entire staff listening in if the President decided to rake her over the coals.

She went in the office and shut the door. "Paula Femus here."

The President did not look amused. He looked very dangerously irritated. "Miss Femus, I've lost my broadcast of the Games."

"Yes, sir. It's not just you, sir."

"Is ANYBODY able to see the Games? What about the control room?"

"Um, no sir—"

"FIX IT! I don't want to hear that we've had a mass murder in the arena and we don't even have footage!"

"Yes, sir, we're working on it sir."

"Do so. Or I'll ask my Peacekeepers to start working on methods of punishment. Snow out."

Paula steeled herself to go back in the control room. Why did this have to happen in her moment of triumph? Some crazy accident or – could it be sabotage?

"Milady? We have an idea. We can send a powerful signal that will bounce back when it hits the obstruction. The time gap will tell us how far down the cable the the problem is."

"Do it!"

"We'll need to reconfigure some things. The cable is not designed to work that way. That'll take about an hour."

"Get started. And send out a hovercraft along the route of the cable. Maybe there is visible damage that we can spot."

Subordinates rushed around obeying orders, while Paula sat in her chair and sulked. It wasn't fair. She was getting a lot of praise for her design of the arena, and it was going to evaporate because of a technical problem beyond her control. That it was far more unfair to put 24 innocent teenagers in danger every year did not occur to her. Not did the fact that the Rabbit Warren concept was somebody else's idea and that she had claimed credit for it.

After about 40 minutes the screens lit up again.

"We have the signal back," said the communications officer.

"Good work."

"It wasn't us. It came back on its own."

"Can you tell what went wrong?"

"Not yet."

"Keep at it." If the system inexplicably went wrong once, it could do it again.

"Should we turn the broadcast back on?" asked the TV expert.

"No. We need to evaluate the problem and be ready to answer some questions. Can you find the tributes' trackers?"

"Trying," said the tracker tracker. "One, two, three,…. ten signals."

"There are supposed to be seventeen tributes out there!"

"Yes, milady. But I'm only getting ten. We're not even getting "This One's Dead" signals from the others."

The control room staff stared at each other. In spite of the most stringent security in the world, they had just lost track of seven tributes.

(TO BE CONTINUED)


	2. DAMAGE CONTROL

**They Just Fade Away**

 **Chapter 2 DAMAGE CONTROL**

Paula called the highest-ranking members of her team into her office and made sure the anti-surveillance machinery was working suitably.

"First," she said, "what will be the consequences if the current situation leaks out?" She stared at Dirce Tribonia, the legal expert.

Dirce looked uncomfortable. "There's no entry in the law code that exactly covers this, and no precedent. There IS the old military principle that if a guard lets a condemned man escape, the guard can be punished in his place and by the same method."

Sybil Cumming, the communications expert, looked puzzled. "Put us in the Hunger Games?"

"Maybe. Or they may decide that "Hunger" is the operative word and use death by starvation."

 _(NARRATOR'S NOTE:_ _Dirce's analysis is apparently accurate, since this principle was applied to Seneca Crane after the 74_ _th_ _Games)_

"We're saying "us", said Sybilt. "Will it really be us, or just – " she glanced at Paula.

"If I'm condemned, I will try to take people with me," said Paula. "Particularly those I think were insufficiently helpful." She looked out at the dismayed expressions of the others. "Let's look at this another way. How can we create the illusion that nothing is wrong and that this is a normal Games? We can't just say that the seven died during the blackout. The President ruled that out. He wants footage."

"We've got lots of footage from 59 years of hunger games," said Sybil . "Substitute it in-"

"Viewers will be able to tell it's different people," said Luke Livio, the archivist. "Their fellow district citizens will know what their tributes look like, even if nobody else does."

"Fuzzy up the film," said Sybil..

"We can't," said Paula. "Our job is to provide the spectacle of the Games. Not fuzzied-up spectacle."

"Given time, we can use some CGI and make the historical images look like the currently missing people."

"Do we have a list of the missing ones?" asked Dirce.

"Yes," said Luke. "I've got the names, and their pictures should be easy to obtain." He punched some buttons and caused a 3D list to appear in the middle of the table.

Robb Seldon, District 3 male

James Calvin District 5 male

Millie Sandy Bailey, District 6 female

Peter Marlowe, District 8 male

Callie Harding District 8 female

Lee Anna Darell, District 11 female

Catelyn Palver, District 12 female

"Hmmm", hummed Sybil. "No Careers."

"Do you think that's relevant?" said Dirce.

"It might be. Suppose the missing tributes had some choice in the matter? A Career would probably opt to stay in the arena and aim for the glory of winning. Somebody else might simply want out of the Games."

"I'll better get images of all 17," said Sybil. "Fake 7 fights with the appropriate faces on the winner and "loser"."

"We're missing something," said Luke "Faking images won't cut it. We're supposed to ship bodies back to the Districts in coffins. And we're short seven bodies."

"We can ship something else, as long as they don't open the coffins," said Paula. "Which districts have open-coffin funeral customs?"

"I can look it up," said Dirce.

"And if a District has an open-coffin custom," said Sybil, "maybe we can persuade the mentor to prevent the opening."

"Prevent how?" asked Paula.

"Give them an advantage in next year's Games."

"Or maybe we can devise an excuse not to send the bodies," said Aphrodite Anderson. "Like, set the morgue on fire."

"Aaaarrggh!" shouted Dirce. "Everything that we propose just gets her deeper in trouble. Rigging the games, and arson? Why don't we just solve the disappearance, and give Snow the problem and the solution at the same time?"

The participants stared at each other.

"Oh," said Aphrodite. "I never thought of that."

TO BE CONTINUED

 _(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Since I'm terrible at names, I took the tributes' last names from Asimov's future history and the first names from GAME OF THRONES.)_


	3. MAN WHO WASN'T THERE

**They Just Fade Away**

 **Chapter 3 Man Who Wasn't There**

 _(AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am sorry that I was delayed adding this chapter. First there was Hurricane Irma, then I had overtime at work later in the week)_

Chief Peacekeeper Pretorius's best assistant Lieutenant Vir entered his boss's office with a very peculiar expression. "Boss, we have a very odd mystery."

"What is it?"

"Seven people have called in to say that there's a body in the arena."

"There are supposed to be bodies in the arena. It's the Hunger Games."

"This one's not dressed as a tribute."

Now Pretorius was interested. One of the ironclad rules of the Hunger Games is the supplies available to the tributes were severely limited. A non-tribute outfit was supposed to be a no-no – and a curiously useless no-no.

"What do the Gamesmakers say?"

"They deny that a body was there. And they sent us this." Virt turned on his 3D viewer. A picture came up, one that the Chief had been familiar with throughout the Games this year: a low hill, with a cave visible several dozen meters up, and a couple of boulders at the foot.

"I don't see anything," said Pretorius.

"That's what the Gamesmakers insist," said Vir. "but the witnesses all said that was the part of arena where they saw him..

"Could it be a mass delusion?"

"A very specific mass delusion. Each caller said the body was dressed in dark green, had black hair, was lying in front of the largest boulder, and the only wound seemed to be a blow to the head, based on bleeding into the hair. By the way, they all agreed that they saw the body no more than 15 minutes after the broadcast came back on. Meaning that the man probably entered, and was killed, during the blackout."

"Or, turning it around," Pretorius mused, "the PURPOSE of the blackout was to cover up his entrance, or his murder, or both. Did the Gamesmakers ever give an explanation of the blackout?"

"No, sir."

If it had been anybody else behaving like that, Pretorius might have threatened them with legal consequences. But everything associated with the Hunger Games had immense prestige. Snow could threaten Gamesmasters, but the Peacekeepers couldn't. They needed another approach.

"Was the dead man's face visible?"

"Yes, sir. But of course the viewers had no way of recording it."

Of course. Individually-owned cameras or image-processing devices in general were prohibited decades ago. Too much danger of them recording something scandalous.

"We could question them all," said Vir, "but it's not likely that seven people can agree on a detailed description based on seeing an image on a screen for a few seconds."

"Mind's eye," said Pretorius suddenly.

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

"I think I know somebody that can help."

0-0-0-0-0-0

Standing in front of the door marked Dr. Anna Young, Pretorius hesitated a minute. The last time he saw Dr. Young , she gave him the willies. She would probably do it again today. Pretorius had come alone because he preferred not to have his assistant watch him squirm.

She opened the door on his knock. "You again."

"Um, yes. We've decided that we need your help."

She ushered him in. "What's wrong?" she asked sardonically. "Your favorite interrogation techniques not working anymore?" Her eyes seemed to bore into him, looking through his head directly into his brain. That was how she gave him the willies.

"I don't have 'favorite interrogation techniques'. I disapprove of torture. "

"Last year I tried to persuade your department that my hypnotic skills were both more reliable than torture and more humane. I was rejected."

"By my superior officer, backed up by Snow."

She pointed out his insignia. "Now YOU'RE the superior, and you need my help. Enough for you to fend off Snow and give me the job?"

Pretorius sighed. "I can fend off Snow. How much salary do you demand?"

"It's not the money." Her eyes stopped boring into him and softened. "Let me explain where I'm coming from. My cousin was arrested by mistake three years ago. I tried to intercede with the cops, explaining that I could use hypnotism on her memory to determine what really happened. They turned me down, and they "interrogated" her, and got useless information, because she knew nothing but wanted to stop the pain."

"I spent two years studying judicial procedures, and studying how to adapt hypnotism to obtain information. But I applied again, and was rejected again. Now, third and last chance. Are you going to hire me, and USE me as a kinder, gentler interrogator?"

"I think this is a big case. If we crack it, I'll have enough clout to push through your hiring and justify it to Snow."

"All right. What's this all about?"

He described the phantom murder case to her. To his surprise, she giggled. "Reminds me of an ancient nursery rhyme."

" _As I was walking up the stair_

 _I met a man who wasn't there._

 _He wasn't there again today._

 _I wish, I wish, he'd go away."_

She returned to prose. "This isn't just a mystery to you, there seems something supernatural about it. And you aren't superstitious, so it REALLY irritates you."

"That's about it."

"I'll come when you're ready for the attempt. One thing. Do you think you can get your seven witnesses to agree to being hypnotized? I can't do it against their wills."

"Let's just say that we have a technique of our own. It's called Good Cop Bad Cop. I'll see you."

TO BE CONTINUED.

 _(AUTHOR'S NOTE: The rhyme was from a Gilbert-and-Sullivan style operetta, by an English writer named_ ** _Hughes Mearns )_**


	4. THE MAN WITH NO NAME

**They Just Fade Away**

Chapter 4 The Man with No Name

" _That corpse is an imposter!" - Arsenic and Old Lace._

Vera Kratich had a very cushy job. It was just being a file clerk, but being able to say "I work in the Hunger Games" was enough to impress people. It was also safe. Occasionally the Gamesmasters would mess something up and heads would roll - literally – but she was too far down in the hierarchy to get Snow's attention.

Even when the blackout happened, Vera was not too worried. The Games hierarchy still need files, and somebody to clerk them. She was a little puzzled, however, when Paula Femus called a series of meetings, talking to entire shifts of the workers when they went off duty.

The meetings were held in one of the Games warehouses, the one where the dead tributes were currently being stored until it was time for them to be shipped back to the districts.

The Gamesmistress quickly summarized the blackout mystery. She added "What some of you may not know is that an extra body has been found in the arena. A man who apparently infiltrated the arena while all the surveillance tools were down. Apparently he fell, or was pushed, from one of the hills later and fatally banged his head when he hit the ground. Presumably he knew exactly when the surveillance would be down and planned to be gone or in hiding by the time it came back up. So solving HIS mystery may solve the mystery of the blackout. Yes?"

One of the technicians asked "If he was pushed, couldn't we question the tributes and find what they know?"

"The tributes are out of our reach. It could be one of the seven missing tributes. If it's one of the ten remaining tributes, nine of them are going to be dead very shortly. If we're lucky the, ahem, pusher may be the Victor of the Games. We're trying to devise away to question him or her without arousing suspicions. But meanwhile we have another approach."

"It seems unlikely that the intruder simply came in from outside. More likely, he scouted out the entire Games infrastructure, in and out of the Capitol. If so, he might have been seen."

"We've put him in one of the Tribute Preservation boxes. I want everybody to walk past his box and have a look. If you recall seeing his face before, report it immediately. I assure you that simply recognizing him will not get you in trouble. You may have had no way of knowing that he was a threat. Now queue up."

The queue slowly filed into the cold room. Vera was starting to get the willies. There were 23 boxes in the room , destined to hold all the Tributes but the surviving Victor. 10 were already sealed up, presumably holding the Tributes who were already dead. One box was in front, and the Gamesmistress directed everyone past it. Vera recalled that 7 of the other boxes were going to remain unused, because the tributes were missing. Sooner or later outsiders would notice that, and the Gamesmistress was going to be in big trouble.

When it was Vera's turn, she looked in the box, and had a severe shock.

She knew this guy. Or to be precise, she HAD KNOWN this guy, in an anonymous Capitol sex club.

She careful froze her expression, trying to look bored. Nobody was near enough to her to notice her momentary surprise. She had to act as if she had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Once she got back to her workplace, she found an unoccupied file room and stayed there until she got over her jitters.

One hour later, she was summoned to the Gamemistress's office.

-0- -0- -0- -0- -0- -0- -0- -0- -0- -0- -0- -0- -0-

She found herself facing half of a dozen high-reanking Gamemakers.

"What do you know about the intruder?" demanded the Gamesmistress.

"Nothing at all. I don't know why you've called me in."

The Gamesmistress raised her eyebrows and pressed a button on her desk. A hologram of Vera's face sprang up, magnified and shot from an odd angle. Vera's eyes were wide and she was gasping in surprise. "Your expression at his box says otherwise."

"How-?"

"Oh, come now, Ms. Kratich. How do you think we get all of our Games footage? We learnt how to make cameras undetectable decades ago. We had one planted at the box, just in case somebody like you tried to conceal something. So, who is he?"

"I don't know."

"You obviously recognized him, but you don't know who he is?"

"No. I – I encountered him at the Brief Encounters club. You go there for pick-ups, but the rule is everybody's anonymous, going under pseudonyms. It avoids scandals, or getting entangled in relationships."

"I never heard of such a place."

"Excuse me, Gamesmistress," spoke up another woman at the desk, "but I have. Her description is accurate."

"Thank you, Dirce. Do you know a way of getting around the anonymity?"

Dirce blushed, as it became obvious that she had sought pick-ups there herself. "The management insists on seeing everybody's ID on entry, in case something goes wrong – a fight breaking out, or a disease spread by the sexual contact. But of course their success depends on keeping the promise not to divulge names. If the Peacekeepers were to show up and demand information –"

"We can't involve the Peacekeepers," said the Gamesmistress. "We've discussed that." She glared back at Vera. "So, Ms. Kratich. You refused to speak up when you recognized the mystery man. We're rather tempted to dismiss you, unless you give us good reason not to. Can you suggest a way out of the impasse?"

Vera bit her lip nervously until she had an idea. "The man had two friends with him. Presumably they're still alive. If I went back to the club and saw them again –"

"Then we'd have a new lead," concluded the Gamesmistress. "Dirce, I suggest you and Ms. Kratich pay another visit to the club. You can work on screwing information out of management, and Ms. Kratich can try to find the mystery man's friends. We need to find those missing tributes before it's time to ship their bodies home. If you succeed in doing that, well, feel free to avail yourself of the pleasures of the place."

Vera and her interrogators left the office and entered the central control room for the Games. One of the technicians signalled the Gamesmistress. "Milady? While you were in your meeting, a fight broke out in the arena. Four more tributes dead. We shot the cannons, but we need you to authorize the hovercraft pickups."

"Authorized." The Gamesmistress looked stressed out. "Six tributes left. Dirce, go tonight. We need to find the missing people before the Games end. Or Snow may be tempted to ship US in those coffins!" 


End file.
